About NEW CARTOGRAPHY

New Cartography magazine is a one-off special-edition of The New Wolf. The proposal for the magazine was the winning submission to the Anthology brief set by IdeasTap. The magazine was launched online on 15 November, with a print run to follow.

Maps are tools that provide us with a systematic understanding of our environment, a navigational key, a reference point, and a visual representation of our world. But they can also be personal testimonies, narrative depictions of our own experiences. They can tell a story, and situate us among the events of our lives. They can offer us a broader and longer view of our own stories, allowing us to reconsider and reimagine our place within an environment, and to colour that environment with our own memories. New Cartography offers an alternative reading of maps, and an alternative approach to mapmaking, conveying new ways to understand and to navigate urban environments.

The magazine consists of a selection of documentary features and subjective testimonies relating to the urban experience, and offers readers new and original ways of seeing, understanding, responding to and interacting with the built environment. It uses a multidisciplinary approach, drawing on work from fields including architecture, history, geography and psychogeography, urban planning, philosophy and art. Ultimately, New Cartography asks you to evaluate afresh your relation to cities and your own agency within the urban environment.

The magazine includes articles exploring the historicity of map-making, as well as others that draw on specific events from the recent or more distant past. The tension that exists as a permanent feature of the relationship between the built environment and the natural world is also investigated from a number of viewpoints, as is the role of urban planning and the influence of developers in shaping cities. Elsewhere, personal reflections and subjective experiences of the city are documented by writers and artists alike, along with features uncovering hidden or esoteric aspects of the urban environment.

The magazine contains around 30 different projects exploring the theme of New Cartography. One article reveals the lost rivers of london; others reflect on the reclaiming of cemeteries by nature; photo essays provide alternative perceptions of familiar scenes, offering new or alternative impressions of the Barbican, Oxford Street and Berlin; London is navigated using a map of Paris to reveal surprising similarities in urban design; in an interview with Sohei Nishino, the artist describes how his documentary photographs come to form giant, panoramic maps of cities; in Nairobi, a radical mapping project empowers slum-dwellers by giving them ownership of cartographic information and the maps thereby produced; the residual effects of post-war housing policy in the suburbs of London, Paris and Amsterdam are observed and documented.

The magazine will be serialised here on The New Wolf with the publication of an article a day until Christmas. If your impatience gets the better of you however, the whole publication can be viewed here.